​​Italian pianist and composer Marco Dalpane is presenting in these weeks an absolutely unique event, “Keaton, il comico senza sorriso”(Keaton, the Great Stone Face), twenty hours of original music composed to score thirty films by the legendary American actor, director, and screenwriter. This project, which took Dalpane over ten years of study and passion, features ten dates presenting the complete series of eleven feature-films and nineteen short films written, directed, and starring Buster Keaton, produced between 1920 and 1928. The series of screenings, accompanied by live performances, opened in Bologna (at the Teatro Galliera) in December 2016 and will close on April 9, 2017 with The Navigator (1924) and Steamboat Bill Jr. (1928), and includes milestones of cinema, such as The General, which celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2016.

This awe-inspiring programme is performed live by the Musica nel buio ensemble, a collective with varying formations of two to eight musicians, appearing in different combinations for each of the screenings in the Keaton project. Apart from Marco Dalpane himself (piano), the ensemble includes Marco Zanardi (clarinet, tenor sax), Francesca Aste (synthesizer), Alberto Capelli (electric guitar), Pierangelo Galantino (electric bass), Claudio Trotta (drums), Angelo Adamo (chromatic harmonica), Vincenzo Vasi (theremin, voice, toys, objects).

Over the years Marco Dalpane has composed music for dozens of films by the great masters of cinema, including Pabst, Murnau, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Lubitsch, and Czinner, for both chamber ensembles and solo piano, before conceiving the ambitious project to score all the silent films made by Buster Keaton. “His face is the first film image indelibly engraved in my memory as a child”, explains Dalpane. “His films have a universal quality that perfectly represents the extraordinary potential of this medium which, while evolving rapidly in terms of technology, continues to speak to everyone. This is why the range of our music includes different forms and styles: Tin Pan Alley, ragtime, fake jazz, post-rock, minimal, military marches, lunatic fringe, blues, free impro. The music proceeds through rhythmic contrasts, rapid accelerations, suspensions, strenuous ostinati, fractures. The continuity of the discourse is constantly sabotaged by accidents and malfunctions, the true agents of musical form projected into a state of constant evolution. Yet Keaton’s action is stubbornly experimental, he never gives up in the face of obstacles, and thanks to his quick and amazing imagination he reacts to every catastrophe, rebuilding the world by pure willpower”.